“Hey, do you want to buy one of these? It’s for that memorial they’re trying to build. For the tenth anniversary.”
Abbie gestured to a corrugated box of bumper stickers beneath a sign that said $5. On the sticker, amid clip art of praying hands, crucifixes, and angels, was the slogan that had become the official death rattle of the town of Bliss, Texas. WE REMEMBER THE FIFTEENTH OF NOVEMBER. Eve hated that phrase, its bombastic, Orwellian undertone. And the memorial dreamt up by the Fifteenth of November set was plainly contemptible. One of those mothers once mailed her an artist’s rendering of their vision: four iron crosses, vaguely in the style of the famous cruciform I-beam that was left of the World Trade Center after the attacks. Four crosses, representing the four murdered. But what about Eve’s son? A half cross, maybe? Just the horizontal beam? Well, Oliver was half Jewish.
“Anniversary, huh?” Eve said. “Like a special occasion.”
“It’s a nice thing. A good thing they are doing. A way to remember.”
“Honestly, Abbie, that whole town is a memorial. Why would we need another?”
Abbie could hardly manage a shrug now. “Eve.” Abbie rubbed at her ear. “You aren’t alone in this.”
Abbie said this with her bland, Christian-comfort voice, but of course Eve knew it was also a kind of reprimand. Abbie meant that small army of grieving families, friends, teachers, and classmates, officially called Families of the Fifteenth of November, who were behind the big memorial plans. It was largely parents who comprised the group; the children had mostly vanished from the area, hoping (Eve supposed, and who could blame them?) to put that night at a great distance behind them, both geographically and psychologically.
Back in the driver’s seat, when Eve reached into the brown paper sack for her pills, she found that Abbie Wolcott had slipped in a complimentary bumper sticker. WE REMEMBER THE FIFTEENTH OF NOVEMBER. As if anyone out there could ever forget. As if she and Oliver both were not still sealed inside that date. As if all the questions of that night, all Eve knew and couldn’t know about what had happened to her son, could ever fade into the past. WE REMEMBER THE FIFTEENTH OF NOVEMBER. There was so much Eve tried not to remember, her whole past lying stained and shattered on the floor of that schoolhouse classroom. Why? She had worked so hard not to think about it, had tried to narrow her concerns to the ten-by-ten room that held Bed Four, but almost ten years later, that question was still in the room with her, every day.
CHAPTER THREE
Eve had no answers that mattered. She only knew the same facts as everyone else. On that November fifteenth, at 9:09 on the night of the Bliss Township Homecoming Dance, a twenty-one-year-old graduate of that school, a scrawny, multiply tattooed, shaven-haired, and sunken-eyed young man named Hector Espina Jr., had parked his pickup outside a rear door of the schoolhouse and entered the building with an AR-15-style assault rifle, which he had purchased at a gun show in Midland. He had walked not to the dance in the gymnasium, where he could have inflicted maximum carnage, but just to a certain classroom near the back door, where the Theater Club was preparing to go onstage to offer its traditional, biannual performance of a few Spanish-language hits. According to that room’s surviving students, Hector said nothing before he lifted his weapon. The horror was amplified by its swiftness: the whole thing lasted less than a minute. Within sixty seconds, three children and Reginald Avalon were gone. As Hector left the classroom, he found one more student near the doorway, far from the activities of the Homecoming Dance. What was Oliver doing there? A question that Eve knew better than to ask, even if the unreasonable questioner who resided near her heart could never stop asking it. Eve tried to accept it as blunt fact: Hector did find Oliver there, aimed his weapon, and murdered her family’s future.
Perhaps Hector had in mind further bloodshed, down in the gymnasium; perhaps he had already completed his heinous mission. No one would ever know, because as Hector walked from the theater classroom toward the school’s front doors a janitor named Ernesto Ruiz, working extra hours at the dance that night, secreted himself behind one of the Ionic columns that stood in the atrium. Just as Hector passed, Ernesto lunged from his hidden spot, and in the ensuing scuffle, Ernesto managed to wrangle the rifle from the boy’s hands. Hector scampered away, but not—as it turned out—unarmed. In the waistband of his jeans, Hector carried a second weapon that night, a blunt-nosed .45 he had lifted from beneath his father’s bed.
Texas, setting to so many of the West’s great hangings and blindfolded executions, was a state that still made proud and frequent use of the death penalty, but out there, on the schoolhouse steps, Hector took care of that penalty himself, applying the barrel of his father’s handgun to the center of his own forehead, pulling the trigger, leaving the town to tear itself in two with its questions.
In the first weeks after, the governor appointed a task force, a bunch of cheap-suited city guys, to investigate alongside the FBI. Most of what this task force turned up the town already knew: Hector Espina Jr. had been a minor dealer of drugs around town and also the son of Hector Espina Sr., a sanitation worker, undocumented and of Mexican extraction. On television news, Hector Sr.’s friends and neighbors tried to distance themselves from Hector Jr.—“psychopath,” “strange in the head,” “dirt poor,” and “loner” were the diagnoses they offered. “Sad” and “angry” and “motherless” were the only explanations offered by Hector Sr. himself. But it had been a year of growing violence along the border, a summer of a great many deportations, an autumn of heightening tensions and occasional skirmishes outside Bliss Township School, and so a certain element of the county’s white population rushed to their reflexive conclusions.
“Enough of these madmen sneaking over the border with their guns and their drugs,” Donna Grass told Eve, in one of her teary visits to Oliver’s bed, just a few weeks after. “Something has to be done. We owe our children that much. We owe them that.”
“I really don’t see what any of this has to do with drugs,” Eve said. Her son was still intubated then, unbudging and sallow in an induced coma, and Eve’s early grief was still such a combustible, ungainly force that it seemed an accomplishment whenever she could restrain her sorrow long enough to allow any visitor to leave the room unscathed. But Eve reminded herself that Donna had lost her daughter, and so Eve did her best to make a seam of her mouth.
“Have you seen what it’s like down there on the other side of the river?” Donna said. “It’s practically a war. A never-ending war. You have no idea. It makes them all think that violence is a perfectly acceptable response.”